So….what do you do? Isn’t that the question to end all questions! Well, for starters, let me tell you that I do understand from the inside out how you feel because I have been there. And the most important discovery I have made out of that time in my life is that nothing worth having is ever easy to come by – and if it ever looks that way, it is only because the years of hard work and dedication behind it that are well hidden behind the glow of victory surrounding that person.

What do I mean when I say I have been there? I mean I endured years of what I would call ‘lightly to moderately suicidal’ thoughts and behaviors – ED among them. I mean I would wake up each morning with a jolt of anxiety, dreading another day. I mean I would allow the mean, negative, self-hating thoughts to run rampant and unchecked in my head, such that I would rather kill myself than listen to myself for one more minute. And I mean I would have to call a friend or a sponsor to sit on the phone with me for hours to make sure I didn’t do harm to myself.

Because of this, first let me say this – if you really wanted to kill yourself, you would have done it already. When I realized this, when I realized I had chosen the coward’s way to suicide by ‘letting’ my sore loser of an ED feel like it was ‘winning’ for awhile, I got off my butt, took a good hard look in my EYES in the mirror, and asked myself what was up. You don’t really want to die, just like I didn’t really want to die. You’re just not sure why you should want to live. THIS is the work before you – to create for yourself a life worth living, that is worth fighting for.

So this is my advice to you. Get up and KEEP FIGHTING. Anything worth having – like your life – is worth giving a lifetime to achieve. Study the lives of the great humanitarians in this world – begin to identify your struggles – and similar probability of success - with theirs. Read about Mother Teresa, who worked for years serving the poorest of the poor, all the while doubting whether God even existed! Read Corrie Ten Boom’s story, about how she persevered and survived, in part by helping the others she was interred with in the concentration camps, even though she wasn’t a even Jew! There are so many inspiring examples of people who, like you and me, have faced death eye to eye and have survived – because they DECIDED they would!

When I began fighting my anorexia, I didn’t even have a name for my disease. And it took me fifteen years to gain the upper hand over my ED and finally blast out of that prison for good. But I knew one thing about myself from the first moment I began truly fighting – from that ‘aha’ moment I described above – I knew I wasn’t a coward. And I decided I’d rather die trying and have the chance of succeeding than die never knowing if I could have overcome it. I decided that no matter what, I wasn’t going to just lay down and die and let ED have me.

You have to decide who you are – you have to create an identity that is free from your ED that feels powerful, compelling and real to you, and then you have to fight for HER – for that identity who is locked in hand-to-hand combat with an assassin named ED. You have to pull out all the stops. When your mind won’t stop thinking in ways that pull you down, then you have to climb on top of your mind and arm wrestle it to the ground and FORCE it to think positive, high, optimistic, hopeful, faith-full, determined thoughts of yourself, recovery and life after ED. You must become the master of your mind, working around the part that is still working for ED’s cause and using it to overcome, not further, your disease. You must turn your mind from your enemy into your ally, and you must turn all of that misdirected potential you have been using to get very good at your ED and use it to get very good at OVERCOMING your ED.

All the proof you will ever need that you can do this – you can heal – is already there for you. All you have to do to find it is to look at the seriousness of your ED. If you can do that, imagine what you could do if you turned all that power around to healing from it!

And most of all you must create for yourself a battle cry in all this – what I call a ‘key to life’. For me, this was my music – when the ED stole my ability to write, play and sing music, I got mad enough to put my foot down. I swore an oath that I would never let that lying, scheming ED get away with stealing what mattered most to me. So my ‘key to life’, the thing that mattered MORE to me than what my ED had to offer, was my music. And even as young as I was at that time, I had the maturity to realize that I had to make a choice – I could not have both. I could not have both my ED and the rest of my life! This caused a lot of denial, rebellion, grief and bargaining in me at first – I went through a classic grieving process in letting my ED go. But on the other end of my grief was the new life I have now. It was worth it – it is always worth it.

This is the most fundamental truth you must understand before any real healing can begin. I know that sometimes it is difficult to find appropriate, helpful treatment options. But if you have been to that many facilities and have consulted with as many professionals as you describe, and you are the constant in an otherwise changing landscape of treatment team members, then it is not that the treatment hasn’t worked. You, for reasons only you know for sure, haven’t been fully participating in your own recovery journey. Often this has to do with not knowing who and what waits for you when ED is no longer in your life. This can be solved, as I discussed above, by creating an identity for yourself that is your ‘impossible dream’ of who you want to be – and then by designating one or more ‘key to life’ battle cries that are motivational enough to keep you fighting for a lifetime to get your life back. And then you go back to work – and this time it’s for keeps!

This is how it is done. The work starts now. Now is when you take your first step out across the Grand Canyon, into the great unknown of recovered-life, in faith that I have done it, many others in this support network have done it, and so there is no reason in the world you cannot do it too. You said it yourself – you are the one to decide whether to help yourself and let others help you. If you think you can’t, if you think it’s not worth it, then you can’t, and it’s not worth it. If you think you can, if you think it’s worth it, then you can, and it is worth it.

It really is as simple as that. This is how it is done – this is the only way it can be done. My thoughts are with you in this tough time – let us know how we can help and support you.

Much love,

Shannon

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